Tansits Week 3 Blog Post

A negative undertone highlights the readings for this week, mainly in Salwen’s Finding Their Place in Journalism: Newspaper Sports Journalists’ Professional “Problems”. To lead off the study, Salwen points to the history of journalism that gave it a sensationalist nature early on. He says that the sports writers and sections weren’t taken very serious in the beginning of their existence. Salwen then talks of surveys showing that even though sports journalists said that their field was becoming more respectable, it turns out that this tenant may not be exactly true.

The research report shows that professionalism ranked highest of all on the list of problems that sports journalists believe their field faces. Professionalism amongst colleagues and in terms of taking “freebies”, all of which are constituted under this guideline. Salwen also talks of the intermixing of perceived problems of competition, economics and professionalism. He writes that many print sports journalists think that broadcast sports journalists are ruining the respectability of sports journalism and giving the field a bad name. He also explains how many journalists tie this competition to economic problems, saying that because of this competition revenue for newspaper sports sections is on the downward. Overall this is a dim picture painted by those in the business, with a lack of agreement on one or two distinct problems to work on in the future.

The second reading, Tweet Talking: How Modern Technology and Social Media Are Changing Sports Communication, gives a slightly different picture. This reading speaks of how radio and print built the foundation for the future of sports journalism, and up until the past decade the field hadn’t changed drastically. Author Drew Hancherick gives examples of how the Internet and Twitter has changed the entire landscape of sports journalism. The new Internet era of sports journalism, Hancherick writes, is one of immediacy and content control. People are getting whatever news they want, whenever they want it. As Hancherick explains through an example using Bill Simmons, this creates a problem of having to break news before confirming it with multiple sources. The picture that Hancherick paints is one of uncertainty in the future for sports journalism. This isn’t necessarily a bad future, but more so one full of changes ahead. Something that the journalists surveyed in Salwen’s piece don’t particularly seem ready for.